


The Revolution Will Not Be Catechized

by Las



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Angst, Episode Related, Gen, Revolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-10
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-14 15:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Las/pseuds/Las
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>6x03 coda. Castiel between two worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Revolution Will Not Be Catechized

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Metonomia for betareading.

By the time Castiel rises through the roof, Balthazar is already a pinprick of light in the distance.

"Cas?" he hears Dean call out, but there is no time. There is never any time these days, and he feels only a slight pang of regret as he streamlines his wings and propels himself toward the horizon.

"I know this game!" Balthazar chortles when Castiel is close. "I think the apes call it tag."

"Brother, let us talk," Castiel says, but Balthazar just laughs again, a more rueful sound.

Castiel chases him to the Atlantic, and sees Balthazar's wings flick sharply before his brother plunges into the water. He follows without hesitation, down where the blue-green becomes black, deeper where the cold numbs and the pressure crushes. Balthazar veers into the Mariana Trench where – as Castiel discovered early last year – God was not to be found.

"Balthazar!"

"Play the game, Cas!"

He chases his brother across the deserts of northern Africa, so fast that they leave sandstorms in their wake. Balthazar jumps from mountain to mountain along the bony spine of the Caucasus, teasing Castiel with proximity only to flit away in the nick of time. Eventually Castiel manages to grab a wingtip and Balthazar yelps as he twists in mid-air and crashes into a cliff face, causing an avalanche that will block the mountain passes for weeks.

"Brother," Castiel pleads, but Balthazar twists out of his grasp and Castiel is left holding a fistful of feathers made of God's breath and the first light. Disconnected from their host, they flicker once and fade.

Castiel loses Balthazar somewhere just over the Arctic Circle. The world is muted and pale around him here, its wildness stretched wide over open space. The ice crackles under his feet when he alights, and Castiel remembers thousands of years ago, the four of them standing at the dawn of God's creation – Uriel, Anael, Balthazar, and himself, listening to the songs of the aurora. He remembers Anael spreading her wings and rising into the air, beckoning, _Come, brothers, let us sing with it_.

No one sings in Heaven anymore. Perhaps, he thinks, they have forgotten the words.

+

In retrospect, letting the Winchesters know that Castiel can hear their prayers may have been a bad idea.

_–and I don't know what the hell is up with him anymore, man. You shoulda seen what Sam did to some werewolves we found last week, that shit will turn your stomach._

Yofiel's voice cuts through his thoughts. "Castiel?"

He looks up. "I'm listening."

_Do you guys even have stomachs? What do multiwaveform celestial thingamajigs eat anyway?_

"We've consolidated power in the Third and Fourth Heavens," Yofiel continues. ( _I mean, other than hamburgers_ , Dean adds.) "Baruchiel reports that negotiations with the santelmo are going well. If we have them on our side, then we can make a realistic bid for the Second Heaven."

_Hamburgers and tequila shots. Fuckin' breakfast of champions. Look, I know you're busy up there--_

"It would be more prudent," Gazardiel cuts in, "to wait until we've negotiated the alliance with the Fae before we try something that big."

Yofiel rolls her eyes. "The Fae will never budge."

_\--but all I'm asking is, if you can just take, like, a minute and check up on Ben and Lisa from time to time--_

"The cracks in the firmaments have not been kind to them either," Castiel points out, feeling the need to overcome and contribute. "They need a helping hand as much as we do."

_\--then I will buy you ten thousand thank-you hamburgers._

"And if hamburgers--" Castiel says, then snaps his mouth shut, mortified.

Gazardiel frowns. "What?"

"Nothing," he mutters. "Continue, I'll be right back."

Gazardiel and Yofiel exchange glances, and Castiel ignores the quiet implications as he leaves.

He finds Dean in a motel room off of Route 1 just as he says amen. With that, it is silent in Castiel's head. He steps to the motel window and notices the line of salt laid out on the ledge. Dean is lying stomach-down on the bed farthest from the door. There is a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam on the bedside table.

Sam steps into view in the window, wearing what Dean has told him is called the bitchface.

"Hello," Castiel says.

The younger Winchester rolls his eyes and closes the curtains. A few seconds later, the room door opens and Sam steps out. The door clicks shut behind him and he leans against the wall, crossing his arms. "What are you doing here?"

"Checking on you," Castiel improvises, then realizes it's not a lie.

"We're okay."

"Good."

The pause yawns wide between them. Sam seems to be considering something, or poking at something caught in his molar with his tongue, Castiel isn't sure.

"So what did he pray for?" Sam asks.

"What?"

"Come on. I heard him muttering to himself while I was in the bathroom. Figured he was talking to you. Or that he's gone insane. Probably both by now, actually." Sam shrugs.

"He was praying for you," Castiel admits. "And for Ben and Lisa."

Sam looks down. He is playing with a frayed thread come loose at the elbow of his shirt. "What did he say."

"That he misses you. And he misses them."

Sam nods.

"I have to go," Castiel announces.

"Yeah, yeah, by all means," Sam exhales. "Do you, I dunno, wanna leave a message for Dean or something?"

"Tell him," he says, "that ten thousand burgers is too much, even for an angel."

Sam blinks. "O...kay. Man, I don't even wanna know."

Castiel is about to unfurl his wings, but then he hesitates. "Sam, you've stopped praying," he says. "But if you... need anything..."

"You actually gonna answer this time?" Sam asks, raising his eyebrows.

"Just keep it short."

The left corner of Sam's mouth quirks up. "Right."

Before he returns to Heaven, he makes one more stop. In Cicero, Ben is snoring with what anyone might call deep relish. In the master bedroom, Lisa is restless with nightmares. Her body is twitchy with it, her eyelids flickering, her shoulders tense. Castiel touches her forehead and plucks out images of changelings and broken lines of salt, Dean dead at her feet and Ben taken away by some faceless evil. Castiel silences the screams. He reaches for her heart and holds it in his until it stops pounding, until her breaths are steady.

Lisa sighs and rolls over, reaching for the empty space next to her. Satisfied, Castiel leaves.

+

When Balthazar enters his Monaco hotel room, Castiel is already waiting in a chair by the window. He falls silent mid-sentence, and the two girls on his arm stop giggling, and shift uneasily.

"Cas, what a surprise," Balthazar smiles. "You know it's always great to see you, but I would've appreciated a little more notice."

"I'm full of surprises," Castiel replies.

"You are now," Balthazar concedes. Castiel waits as he tells the girls that he is very sorry, but they'll have to continue business another time.

"What business would that be?" Castiel asks wryly once the girls are gone.

Balthazar pokes through the contents of the minibar. "I don't know if it's any kind of business with which you're familiar. Scotch?"

"I didn't come here to drink with you."

"In that case," Balthazar says, and tosses something shiny at Castiel, "have some peanuts."

Castiel tosses the peanuts onto the coffee table and demands, "Who else did you sell the Staff of Moses to? What other weapons do you have?"

Balthazar makes a "psh" sound and exudes aloofness in that infuriating and familiar way, so familiar that Castiel can imagine the wings twitching absently, the burning wheels spinning slow and intermittent. Castiel says things along the lines of _Don't you see? You and me, together as before, we can end it_. All this gets is a fond sigh from Balthazar.

Castiel gets into his space and brings out the stories about the body count, about Raphael's cruelty and the fanatical devotion of his followers, and Balthazar laughs. He puts his drink down on the dresser, then puts his hands on Castiel's shoulders.

"Perhaps we can end the war, brother," Balthazar says. "Perhaps not. But even if we could, the end of war doesn't mean the end of fighting. Say you win, Cas, and you become king of all the angels. What will you do then?"

Castiel frowns. "I would try to govern as best I can."

"What will you do with those who disagree with you?"

"What are you implying?"

He drapes an arm over Castiel's shoulders. "That for all the bedtime stories about you walking two worlds, O Twice Risen One, you're not that much different. You're not that much changed. At all." Balthazar smiles. "Thank god for that."

Castiel almost smiles back.

+

_In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Dude in the Ugly-Ass Trenchcoat. We're in Worcester, the Red Star Motel. Get the hell over here._

The timing is better this time. Castiel and Yofiel are interrogating a prisoner, but they've gotten most of what they need, and Yofiel can finish up on her own.

"I'll be back for the briefing later," Castiel tells her, wiping the grace stains off his hands, and then he wings down to Massachusetts.

Someone else has a piece of the Staff of Moses, and it takes only a little work tracking it down to a broken old man with a grudge. While Sam intimidates the guy into never messing with magical objects again, Dean approaches Cas, who is inspecting the piece of the Staff in his hands.

"Your buddy's been keeping busy," Dean says.

"In all the wrong ways," Castiel agrees.

"You still don't know where he is?"

"Not all the time."

Dean raises his eyebrows. "Oh, but some of the time you do?"

"Some of the time." Castiel looks up.

"Yeah, so what do you do when you know? Scratch your asses some more? Groom each other's wings?"

Castiel finds himself gritting his teeth. How quickly physical instinct sets in. "I'll handle Balthazar," he says evenly. " _You_ handle Sam."

"Oh, is that so?"

"Yes."

Dean's eyes are blank with challenge, stubborn with the resolution to remain unmoved. He stands up a little straighter, so Castiel does too. They are standing too close again, or so Dean would've told him, once upon a time.

"You gonna let your pal run around and wreak havoc with your weapons of angelic destruction?" Dean demands.

"That," Castiel says, "is not what I said at all."

"Sam is right, you really do play favorites."

"You are the last person who should talk about favoring brothers."

"Guys!" Sam calls out.

Castiel and Dean turn their heads at the same time. Sam is watching them with his hands on his hips, and he looks halfway between wary and amused.

"Ready to jet?" Sam asks.

"Yeah," Dean grunts, and Castiel does not answer because he is no longer there.

+

In the old days, Yofiel fought in another garrison, but these days she is his right-hand. When he returned to Heaven after his second resurrection, he found Yofiel fending off Raphael's soldiers on little more than three broken wings and a grudge against the archangel who smote her garrison for heresy. Castiel threw himself into the melee, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Yofiel finds Castiel in the ramparts, and tells him, "Baruchiel has returned. The santelmo will fight on our side."

"Excellent."

Her light flickers curiously, and she drifts closer. "Are you all right, brother?"

His eyes scan the celestial plain, but it is empty of anything but echoes of destruction. He is thinking of Johael and Sachiel, trussed-up prisoners of Raphael, wondering how long they can last under torture. He is thinking of Dean's rambling prayers, and Sam's tamped-down anger. Balthazar's arm around his shoulder, his voice in his ear: _You're right, Castiel. There are so many other ways this story can end._

"Yofiel," he says, "do you think I've changed?"

"From what?"

"From... who I was, before the war. Before the apocalypse."

Yofiel hesitates. "I don't know. I didn't know you then."

Castiel nods. "Maybe I didn't either."

"Castiel," she says, but that is all she says. The two of them stand in companionable silence, watching the shadows on the plain, until a cherub flits to them with news about the nephilim's demands. Castiel is giving instructions before he even turns around.

There is much to be done.


End file.
